Thoughts on Redmine

A few days ago, I discussed Trac and Redmine. Redmine is a project management tool, similar to Trac, with built-in download tools, bug tracking, etc.

Redmine has a lot of nice features. Chief among them is better integration between multiple projects, so I don’t have to go to 17 separate pages to see the open bugs on my projects.

But I’m worried about the Redmine community. It appears to live in an insular Ruby world, without much participation outside. I wrote about some of those concerns in their forums. I’ve also submitted bugs to Redmine, some with patches.

Also, it’s concerning that, although Redmine includes a very nice forum module, the Redmine forums are still on RubyForge. Also, there are many bugs in the Redmine BTS that have patches but little, if any, comments from the Redmine people that have commit access.

It could just be that Redmine is a fairly new project and just needs some time to get on its feet more. It’s been around since July, 2006, which isn’t all that long on the one hand… or quite awhile, depending on how you look at it.

The git support patch for Redmine looks very nice. However, after a month, it still hasn’t been replied and there’s no indication why. Which also is troubling.

So I think I’ll sit with Trac for a little while until I get a better feel of how Redmine is progressing.

Share this:

Post navigation

10 thoughts on “Thoughts on Redmine”

For those readers that are curious and want to give a quick try to both Trac and Redmine, checkout our BitNami project. You can download free, all-in-one installers for Trac and Redmine that include all the required dependencies (including Apache, Ruby and Python runtimes, and so on).

well, for what it’s worth – I’d never heard about redmine. If you’d package it for Debian I’m sure it would get a bit more users behind it – which in turn would pull some developers and community in too.

Considering I was considering developing something similar to Trac as it wasn’t fulfilling my needs, I’m going to try to help Redmine out instead. (I deal with lots of projects, and trying to connect separate Trac’s together ended up being more trouble than it’s worth; I also need some timesheet system)

I hope you’ll package it for Debian, but even if you don’t I’m glad you pointed me in the way of Redmine.

It is probably not yet suited for Debian packaging due to an insufficient insulation between code and configuration. However, it does have a lot of promise and it would be great to have you (or others) participating there.

I’ve been writing a bit about Trac and Redmine lately. For approximately the 1/3 of the publically-available software that I’ve written, I maintain a Trac site for it at software.complete.org. This 1/3 is generally the third that has the most interest f

I’ve been writing a bit about Trac and Redmine lately. For approximately the 1/3 of the publically-available software that I’ve written, I maintain a Trac site for it at software.complete.org. This 1/3 is generally the third that has the most interest f

I can understand your concerns about the seemingly slow process but my gut feeling from lurking at the forums is that they’re (slowly) accelerating.

As a happy redmine user for over a year I must say I’m fairly satisfied overall. I have not yet stumbled into a single bug (can you maybe cite one?)
so it has been smooth sailing.

The big deal with redmine for me is the UI and ticket-system. I curse trac every time I have to search for a ticket or, god-forbid, just want to follow up a ticket that I submitted myself. I find the redmine UI and search much more usable in these regards.

Been using Redmine for about a year now in conjunction with Eclipse and the TaskTop plugin. works well and for me is WAY better than Trac which in my experience was endlessly buggy and just painful. I have to agree that the Redmine community seems to move a little slowly, and is very rubycentric, but for now, and for me, I’m happy.